Floyd Gottfredson

Floyd Gottfredson's life

Floyd Gottfredson was born in 1906 in a railroad station in Kaysville,
Utah. He took cartooning courses as a youth and won contests early
on; his diligence to become a comic artist wasn't hurt even when a
hunting accident crippled his drawing arm, an injury that lasted for
most of his life. He took jobs first as a projectionist and an
animator upon moving to California in 1929, but made it to his lasting
position in charge of the Mickey Mouse daily strip with the episode
published May 5, 1930. The rest was history: Gottfredson's classic
continuities continued through 1955, and he kept on working on the
strip itself until 1975.

The new characters added to Mickey's universe by Floyd Gottfredson
have become legend: the Phantom Blot, Morty and Ferdie
Fieldmouse, Eli Squinch, Eega Beeva,
Sylvester Shyster, Joe Piper, Captain
Doberman and Gloomy are among some of the more famous.
He's been an inspiration for European Mickey Mouse artists like
Romano Scarpa as well as Americans like Noel Van
Horn, but his plots have inspired hundreds to follow (often rather
awkwardly) in his wake. To some extent, Gottfredson was the
definitive creator of funny-animal adventures for the first ten years
of his career, and Carl Barks looked up to his masterful
work.

Gottfredson's Art Periods

[Note that the links to illustrations in this document are
fairly large and may take a long time to transfer.]

This is my personal breakdown of Gottfredson's periods, based loosely on Frank Stajano's excellent Romano Scarpa page of similar design. As Frank said: "Anything involving aesthetic judgement is going to be highly personal." And like Frank, I've made up the names for Gottfredson's different art-periods. The many samples are scanned in from original newspaper strips, so are in black and white.

1930: Primordial.

Gottfredson's first story featured a long-nosed, very beady-eyed Mickey who looked more like a mouse than he would in any story afterwards.

Example:

1930-33: Mesozoic

Starting later in 1930 Gottfredson took on Earl Duvall as
an inker and clearly liked his style, for he adopted the puffier
Mickey and the crazy embellishments Duvall tended to favor. The art
has a slightly sloppy style at times, with details occasionally
inconsistent; however, Mickey is drawn with great detail, with eyelid
lines emphasized, usually small pupils, and soles on his shoes. An
overall cartoony style is maintained.

1933-36: Classic I

Now the art gets a slightly tighter, more methodical feel to it. Animals formerly drawn entirely of pipe-stems get joints and an increasingly streamlined look (note how the horses are drawn, and even ungainly Tanglefoot has joints in his body). Mickey himself becomes a little less heavy on his feet. The style is still fairly cartoony.

1937-39: Classic II

The art now gets a beautifully realistic quality; while the
characters are still cartoon figures, of course, they have a very
detailed, well-proportioned "naturally perfect" look about them. This
stage is completed by the addition, in 1938, of elaborate shading
techniques. Also, the supporting cast is now drawn with more
realistically human proportions.

Sample strips:

1939-1942: Hellenistic

Similar to the Classic II style, right after The Phantom Blot, the
art swiftly gets much slicker, with saucier expressions on characters'
faces, much bolder poses, and a generally more expressive feel. The
shading isn't quite as heavy as just earlier.

Sample strips:

1943-1946: Gothic

When Dick Moores took over inking for Bill
Wright, Gottfredson seems to have slowly changed his art style to
accomodate Moores' looser line. When Moores turned over the inking
chores to Gottfredson himself in 1945, Floyd kept the same style. Now
the art continues to look very slick and streamlined, but more
cartoony again with more exaggeration.

Sample strips:

1947-1955: Neomezozoic

In the final stage of Gottfredson's career, he gets a slightly more
controlled, soft style, maintaining much of the slick sweep to the
line, but with the characters tending to look more sedate. Although
the basic style is fairly constant, Mickey goes through a bit of a
change in 1951, getting a more bulbous snout and hair on his head,
which tends to make him look older.

In my own opinion, the plots of the strip were the best from
1932-1941, but there were classics before and after that; and the art
was at its best from 1936-1941. But that's just my own opinion. In
Italy, where Romano Scarpa began his career imitating
Gottfredson's Gothic period with extreme fidelity, it's no surprise
that that period is considered Gottfredson's best, for it was the
starting point of their own classic Mickey adventures.